Trump creates kids crisis to leverage border wall, immigration limits

Associated Press

In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, children who have been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States rest in a facility in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday.

In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, children who have been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States rest in a facility in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday. (Associated Press)

The young adult "dreamers" didn't do it for him. Maybe the little kids will.

President Donald Trump's threat to deport DACA immigrants didn’t get him funding for his border wall, limits on legal immigration or other measures.

Now he's separating immigrant children from their parents in hopes of leveraging those same goals. The administration itself has said as much.

The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” illegal immigration policy and the resulting increase in separate detentions for thousands of children has triggered widespread outrage. All living former first ladies — Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter — have condemned the practice.

Religious leaders have joined in, including Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and usually a Trump supporter, who called the family separations “disgraceful.”

Trump’s contention that he’s required to enforce a policy created by Democrats and that only Congress can fix it has been widely rejected as simply not true — even by some Republican leaders. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump “could stop this with one phone call.”

So it will be an interesting meeting Tuesday when Trump sits down with Republicans to discuss pending GOP legislation that would spend billions for his proposed border wall, curb legal immigration and include other measures he wants. One of the Republican bills also would allow families to be detained together.

Democratic lawmakers have been holding high-profile visits to detention centers across the country, including one here Monday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and more than a dozen others including San Diego Democrats Reps. Juan Vargas and Susan Davis.

They seem to be winning the PR battle, but the policy and political struggle continues. A CNN poll released Monday showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose separating immigrant families, though 58 percent of Republicans support it. Only 5 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents approve, according to the poll.

But polls show even stronger opposition to ending the DACA program, yet the future of immigrants who benefit from it remains uncertain. Trump last year announced he was ending the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that allows some immigrants brought here illegally as children to stay, at least temporarily. Despite widespread, bipartisan support for the program, legislative efforts to save it have gone nowhere.

Trump’s move caused a lot of panic among hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients, often called “dreamers.” That subsided somewhat after the courts issued injunctions blocking Trump’s order. DACA recipients can stay for now but the program is in limbo.

Inserting children in such a gamble would seem a high-stakes play. But Republicans generally are reluctant to oppose Trump, who has exacted political revenge on those who do. Maybe seeing that their base is holding with Trump on this matter will encourage them to gut it out. Clearly, they’d rather not have this kind of controversy in an already challenging election year.